Santa Fe Lit Mag Features an Eclectic and Accomplished Collection

“We choose each other,” writes one contributor in the 2015 edition of the Santa Fe Literary Review. She’s referring to her home state of New Mexico, but that simple sentence embodies how this literary magazine translates to the reader. The themes vary, but there is a very specific aesthetic to the Review: spare, no-frills, and visceral. Photographs and artwork are carefully juxtaposed with stories and poems that compliment—or complicate—them. I applaud the editors for such careful work.

As a writer who’s made New Mexico home for the past five years, I was curious about reading a literary magazine published six hours away. Would it be studded with stereotypes of the Southwest, like the nature-seeking mystic or the artist looking for inner peace? Would conventional Southwest imagery and themes be recycled by folks who didn’t even live here?

I shouldn’t have worried. The eclectic and accomplished selection of nearly one hundred contributors, from a ninety-seven year old poet to a Vietnam veteran, managed to evoke the Southwest indirectly. Time and again, the brevity of the work, which echoes the spare and drought-fraught landscape, struck me. In fact, references to water showed up a lot, from the lovely cover photo to mentions of rain and puddles, lakes, beaches, an ocean, and a “green-glass river” in Sue Ring deRosset’s poem “How to Hide in the Canyonlands.” The inclusion of photographer Holly Simonsen’s “Sliver/Cleave Poetry Installation, Great Salt Lake,” a series of three provocative photographs, is all about access: the visual record of cracked, barren earth replacing life-giving water and snow is striking.

This is the first literary magazine I’ve reviewed that has a significant female contributor majority. There’s micro fiction written from the point of view of a book, and a cat. Description tends toward immediate and personal: “Layers” of one character in the short story “Drunk Ocean Revival,” roll against the fellow’s “tight button-down shirt like he had an animal tucked under there trying to escape." In Barbara Robidoux’s poem, “Ermine,” she wryly admits, “If the cabin had been built tight it would have blown down." I felt an ache for Terry Wilson, who writes about Alzheimer’s—a theme I’m seeing a lot of lately in journals and the media—affecting her mother in a unique way: “Now that she has Alzheimer’s, she doesn’t push me away like she used to.”

The Santa Fe Literary Review is like reading through a zoom lens: by focusing on the micro emotions and experiences that transcend a specific landscape, the pages echo of a life-landscape all readers share on one level or another. “She is a footnote in his life,” Erin K. Parker writes in the short story “The Photo Album,” but in hers, he is a chapter.” In Mary Oertel-Kirschner’s poem “The Little Chicken,” a mother criticizes the size of a bird her daughter served many years previous, proving no matter how well we think we know someone, or how far back memories go, there can be grudges just as long and deep:

“You made such a little chicken that time we came to

Albuquerque,”

my mother told me years later.

………………………………………

There was other food, I say,

then instantly see I’ve been trapped.

B. Mitchell Cator helped me reconsider a different kind of fowl: “Mourning doves sit on a wire prettier than any other bird.” There’s another light-hearted nod to the mundane in Danny Rosen’s poem, “1974 Stanley Cup Champions,” which highlights a dog-crap collector with a big imagination.

I couldn’t ignore the intentional collection of art in this journal: plants, rocks, bees, beans, birds, a nude, milkweed, corn silk. Just like their selection of poetry and prose, the Review seems to prefer art that focuses on the minutia that often get overlooked.

Refreshing. Specific. Accessible. That’s my impression of the Santa Fe Literary Review. There were a few printing alignment issues, but the journal was well edited and thoughtfully organized. The interview with author Kate Braveman felt more like a pitch for Braveman’s writer’s residency in Santa Fe than an interview, but that aside, Braverman did share some good nuggets about the writing life. “Good dialogue is not what people always say, but rather what they never say,” he states, and “The page is the final arbiter." The Review only accepts snail-mail submissions, but that hasn’t deterred writers like Sara Lipmann (Doll Palace, Dock Street Press, 2014) who has a piece in this issue. Along with impressive resumes, including a former NEA fellow and many MA’s, MFA’s and Ph.D. holders, the majority of the contributors were from the West and Southwest.

While this journal does seem to have a specific aesthetic in mind, I’d like to see a little more diversity throughout. Overall, I appreciated the certainty of this publication: the staff knows what they like, and how to curate it. It was pleasure to peruse.